Washington Grove’s Virtual Museum

Welcome to Washington Grove’s Virtual Museum. This is an ongoing project that’s sponsored by the Town’s Historic Preservation Commission. Our online collections contain archival:

• documents,
• photos,
• objects, and
• an introduction to our collection of library books.

We live in an historic community, and we’re working on making that history more readily available to both our residents and historians interested in researching our unique little town.

Washington Grove archivist Patricia Patula has spent several years entering our history into a museum quality database program called Past Perfect. Now we’ve now added the program Past Perfect Online to create a Virtual Museum, which allows all of us to access that information from our own computers.

• Enter Our Virtual Museum on Past Perfect Online

Considering that we have over 100 years of minutes, reports and correspondence, this has indeed been a daunting task, and it is still a work in progress, but we’re so excited about our Museum that we want to roll it out even as this work continues.  We hope you’ll help us add to our knowledge and our collections.

While the archived documents themselves are not accessible through the program, you can see a synopsis of each individual document, and if it’s something of interest to you, we can make a PDF copy available to you. We also have a surprisingly extensive library of books both about the Town and by authors who have been or are currently living here in Town. While these are not available for borrowing, you are welcomed to come sit in the Town Office and read them.

We know that many of you have collected Town memorabilia, such as old Washington Grove postcards, pictures of your houses through the years, objects handed down through your families and so forth, and we’re hoping that you will allow us to photograph them and include them in our online collections, while you continue to maintain custody of them.